A couple of years ago, I started promoting a theme site X and later decided to promote a different theme Y. I did not like the domain name that I had registered for X (say generic_name_1.com) so I registered another one (say generic_name_2.com). Neither one is directly related to any theme with any sort of keyword combination.

When I asked my provider to switch over they asked me for more money so I decided to keep the old one as root and leave the new one as an 'external pointer'. At the same time I started promoting a couple of other themes (say A and B) using generic_name_1.com. I call them "virtual sites" because they only existed in different sub-directories of the root. Actually I was redirecting vistors according to the HTTP_REFERER variable.

I forgot to mention that the site is hosted on Windows servers. The majority of the pages of the main site Y are .htm files and some (the most important ones are.asp).

Later I decided to find an additional provider that provided hosting on Linux. There, I have been promoting a different theme (say Z) under a different domain name of course.

Now I have decided to concentrate on theme Y only and stop bothering about anything else. I'd like to keep both generic_name_1.com and generic_name_2.com though.

As far as the Search Engines are concerned:

Google: Ranks generic_name_1.com 3/10 and generic_name_2.com 0/10.
However it indexes the majority of my pages of theme Y under generic_name_2.com considering probably generic_name_1.com as mirror

Yahoo: It indexes pages under both domains. The majority of them appear as a URL address only though (no title or description) which I suppose it is some sort of penalty. Those with the best positions in the result pages are under generic_name_2.com.

MSN: Indexes only a handful under generic_name_2.com. Some of them (the important ones) have very good search positions.

I am thinking of paying my Windows hosting provider to switch the whole site over to generic_name_2.com and just point generic_name_1.com to the Linuk provider. So the theme I like to promote (theme Y) will be only pointed by generic_name_2.com.

- What do you think about how I think to overcome the mess?
- What should I do with Yahoo that indexes my pages under both domains? If I switch, all pages under generic_name_1.com will produce a 404, won't they?
- Should I keep the theme Y under generic_name_1.com (instead of generic_name_2.com) -just because of its much better ranking in Google- and point generic_name_2.com to the the other site hosted on Linux?

Thank you fo your time.